Snow Falling on Cedars

My recent reading binge, for some reason, hadn't included a lot of novels. But last week at the bookstore, I picked up Snow Falling on Cedars (quite literally on a whim as the third book of a "buy two get one free" deal) and have been utterly captivated for the last four days.

The story follows the murder trial on San Piedro, a small and secluded island dedicated to strawberry farming and fishing which lies northwest of Seattle out in the Puget. Only ten years have passed since the end of World War II, and the trial brings to light the tensions simmering between the Japanese immigrants and the rest of the San Piedro population, in writing so beautiful I can't even do it justice here, so I won't try.

There was one passage, however, that really spoke to me in this era of war-mongering and xenophobia. It describes the Japanese islanders responding to FDR's Executive Order 9066, authorizing the mandatory relocation of approximately 120,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese-American citizens living on the West Coast to internment camps in the interior.

They were loaded onto a ship while their white neighbors looked on, people who had risen early to stand in the cold and watch this exorcising of the Japanese from their midst--friends, some of them, but the merely curious, mainly, and fishermen who stood on the decks of their boats out in Amity Harbor. The fishermen felt, like most islanders, that this exiling of the Japanese was the right thing to do, and leaned against the cabins of their stern-pickers and bow-pickers with the conviction that the Japanese must go for reasons that made sense: there was a war on and that changed everything.

There are many things to learn from David Guterson's remarkable book. Though our current president would beg to differ, War is no excuse for injustice. And the pathetic press corps could take its cue from the fictional newspaper on San Piedro Island. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, its editorial page read:

So of all islanders--of all ancestries--the Review would seek as calm an approach as possible in this emergency. Let us so live in this trying time that when it is all over we islanders can look one another in the eye with the knowledge that we have behaved honorably and fairly. Let us remember what is so easy to forget in the mad intensity of wartime: that prejudice and hatred are never right and never to be accepted by a just society.

San Piedro is a small island with many unwritten rules. In a place where your actions are instantly known to all your neighbors, the inhabitants must think twice before antagonizing one another. In a place where everyone knows everyone else, tolerance must be learned or peaceful coexistence becomes impossible. And though many are loathe to admit it, our world today has much in common with the island setting of Snow Falling on Cedars. We are neighbors with everyone now, and the same rules apply to us.
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Read the book. You won't regret it.